Fake announcement of Google "Erotica" search engine posted

Pressbox.co.uk, a UK-based press release distribution site, this morning posted a press release, which claimed that Google now offers a specialized search engine for "adult content," discovering "still photos and movies" from websites around the Internet. The service, called "Grotica", would include "Google’s powerful keyword search functions," which had "been further enhanced for this application with over 3000 synonyms for anatomical terms and erotic activities," the release stated.

"When users visit Grotica.com they will be able to specify a plain language description of the material they are searching for, or point the search engine to an existing image containing similar content. Grotica will then use a proprietary ranking algorithm to return the most relevant hits."

As it turns out, users already too worried (or possibly too anxious for that matter) to see such an open service do not need to get excited about Grotica. The press release in fact was not more than joke, as Google spokeswoman Sonya Boralv told us : "It is not a Google press release and we have contacted the site to ask them to remove it," she said. (THG)